


Come on and love me baby

by jenny_wren



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-10-12
Packaged: 2017-11-15 09:27:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/525778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_wren/pseuds/jenny_wren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean didn’t think of himself as a fallen angel</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Dean didn’t think of himself as a fallen angel, since, well, he never technically _fell_ , he just didn’t _go back_. Because returning upstairs without Sammy, that just wasn’t happening. And returning upstairs with Sammy was currently out because he couldn’t find the damn little brat.

Of course, since he was ignoring Dad’s orders, all his brothers considered him irretrievably fallen, no matter how he protested he wasn’t ignoring them, he was just honoring the earlier, all important order, _look after Sammy_. And since he was cut off from upstairs the demons considered him both target and competitor. Which meant Dean was possibly the only being in existence who didn’t consider himself a fallen angel.

Whatever. Dean had more important things to worry about than what other people thought about him. He had a brother to find.

But after the first few eons of frantic searching, he started to slow down. Sam wasn’t going to be as easy to find as he’d hoped, and really he should have known better, when was anything about the Gigantor easy. He kept looking, going over the same ground with a fine tooth comb but it all took time. And he needed to stop and recharge his angel batteries more and more regularly the longer he was away from upstairs.

Thing was, humans were kind of endearing, the way this, this one single moment in time, was so all-consuming. To a being who could remember back to the creation of the cosmos, the fierce human sense of _now_ was exhilarating.

His brothers were right to an extent, humans were often utterly horrifying, but at the same time they were capable of such love and devotion and sacrifice, Dean was awed. And the fact he could totally help them out, that’s just the icing on the cake. You didn’t get much of a charge from just touching a human soul, but Dean’s wasn’t going to steal away anyone’s soul, so he bargained for those touches, fixing small human concerns that were so all encompassing to them. It was free will in action, a gift for a gift. And, because the charge was so small, he had to keep doing it again and again, and he really didn’t mind one bit.

So he wandered his Dad’s creation keeping an eye out for Sammy and fixing things as he went.

Years are a human concern and Dean had no idea how much time passed before that day in Kashgar when he felt the whole Earth shake and knew the Righteous Man had shed blood in Hell.

“Well shit.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry, this is supposed to be an ongoing story, messed up with the chaptering

“Can you not fix her?” the anxious man in front of him wrung his hands.

“Oh sure, sure I can.” Dean focused his attention back on broken-down, falling apart truck and gently patted the oil-sticky engine. “She’s a real beauty, huh.”

“Yes, yes, always she runs, perfect.”

Beneath his hands Dean felt the spirit of truck purr and make a valiant attempt to rev the engine. Humans truly were astonishing, they created these amazing, complex machines and endowed them with so much love that life sparked into being beneath the gears and wheels. It was faint, unknowing life, a pale shadow of anything Dad had created, but it was _alive_. Like to see any of Dean’s stick up the ass brothers pull off something like that. Humans were _awesome_.

Dean rubbed his thumbs gently over the engine and felt the worn, cracked metal heal under his touch.

“There we go, try again.”

The driver pumped the gas, the engine coughed and turned over. Dean smiled and took a step back. The driver and truck rumbled off, the driver shouting out his thanks as they went.

Dean watched them out of sight as the smile slowly drained from his face. What was he supposed to do?

The Righteous Man had shed blood in Hell. The First Seal had broken. The Apocalypse had started. Heaven shook above him and the Earth roiled beneath his feet as the End of Days began.

“Shit Dad, what the Hell are you thinking?”

He didn’t doubt there was a plan. There was always a plan. Thing was, he wasn’t so fond of Dad’s plans any more. Slowly he brushed his dirty hands off against his old blue jeans and tugged his leather jacket more tightly around his shoulders. 

He just couldn’t deal with The End of Days right then. It was too overwhelming. So sue him, he was angel, he didn’t do well with change. 

But the Righteous Man trapped downstairs, that he got.

Dean had reoccurring, well they couldn’t be nightmares because angel, so day-terrors, horrific moments that suspended him in vivid play-by-plays of Sammy trapped downstairs. Sight-sound-smell so real that the body Dean had been wearing so long he thought of it as his own would rebel against him, legs giving way, insides twisting and expelling bile, salt water dripping from his eyes and nose.

Every couple of centuries or so his paranoia would ramp up to the point where he had to steal downstairs and creep around to check that Sammy really truly wasn’t there. Thankfully Sammy never had been. As much as Dean wanted to find his brother, he’d rather spend the rest of forever looking for him than find him there.

Dean privately thought downstairs was one of Dad’s more ridiculously stupid ideas. Humans did wretched things, true, but somehow Dean didn’t think the solution was to do even more wretched things to the humans’ souls until they weren’t even human anymore. How did that help anyone? Sammy, of course, had a whole bucketful of words to fling on the subject, so Dean’s opinion never really got aired. Not that it mattered because Dean had never been enough of an idiot to think Dad listened to him.

Much as he would like, Dean couldn’t do anything about downstairs itself. Human souls had to go somewhere. And if upstairs was out, downstairs was pretty much the only option unless you preferred going slowly crazy as a ghost on Earth. And after a few years downstairs there wasn’t enough human left to matter.

Dean shivered. They’d have Alastair working on the Righteous Man for sure. Alastair had caught Dean on one of his sightseeing trips and, yeah, that had not been fun. Dean had only gotten out because, way back then, he’d been stronger and Alastair had been weaker. There was no way he’d be able to escape the demon today.

And his ass was still pretty kicked from his last trip downstairs to check Sammy wasn’t there. It usually took him a century or two to regenerate the power drained by less than a month mooching around downstairs.

Really there was nothing he could do. He should go check out the Himalayas again, his little brother had always been drawn to mountains. Fellow feeling, because they were both gigantic, and dumb boxes of rocks to boot.

Dean sighed and picked at the white threads around the edge of his flannel shirt. Even poking at Sammy wasn’t making him feel better. Of course it never worked as well without Sam actually being there to pull his bitchfaces and yank on Dean’s wings in retaliation, but generally Dean was pretty good at imagining grumpy Sam.

He reached back and tugged at his own feathers but he wasn’t masochistic enough to give them the little twist Sam did to make it sting. Besides it wouldn’t work, it still wouldn’t be Sammy. Dean’s wings flared in annoyance, he just wanted his brother back, was that so bad.

Sammy would be all for rescuing the Righteous Man, mostly because it would piss Dad and the demons off, but whatever.

If Dean was quick and quiet he should be able to sneak in and out in no time at all. He knew the way, knew how to dodge the demon patrols, it would be difficult, but not impossible.

Because this was the Righteous Man and Alastair wasn’t going to get bored like he would with a normal soul, it would be like getting hold of an angel all over again.

Dean had popped up in Prague before he’d even had a chance to think it through. The gate downstairs there was well known, even to humans, and a thousand generations had worked to ensure it was well protected against demons. 

But for angel it was easy to twist sideways and slide through the cracks. Also it was entirely possible Dean might have helped out with the third and seventh sealings of that particular gate and left himself a backdoor, but Dean wasn’t thinking about that because if the demons caught even a whiff of a weakness in the gate, they’d have Dean’s guts spilling until he couldn’t help but talk.

Dean didn’t have any illusions left about his ability to resist demons in the long-term and he’d never had any illusions that his brothers would come to his rescue. Sammy would, of course, but the chances were Sammy would never know.

Damn but Dean missed the aggravating little brat.

Quietly he filtered his way downstairs. As always, no matter how he braced himself, the sheer noise caught him off-guard.

Hell was loud.

The clash of huge bronze cymbals, the rattling thunder of steel drums, the fierce growl of horns echoed endlessly round the caverns like the roar of a relentless wind, and in counterpoint came the shriek of metal against metal and high piercing screams. The force of the noise alone would have stripped the flesh from human bones.

Dean felt the shadow of his vessel reform around him. Downstairs was a predominantly human creation and humans conceptualized themselves and those around them with bodies. There was a reason turning a human into a demon meant grinding down the human’s perception of themselves to nothing more than black smoke.

Of course the most powerful demons managed to reform themselves into something that approximated human form. Alistair was one of them.

Not that Dean was thinking about Alistair just then. 

The racket was going to drive him mad. He could barely see straight, let alone think. Gritting his teeth, he hauled a grubby kleenex from his pocket, tore a couple of pieces off and stuffed them in his only mostly there ears.

It felt a lot better, which was good, but also bad because it meant Dean was that much more not-angel.

That was another thing he wasn’t thinking about that now though, or ever really. So he squared his shoulders and went on.

It took him a while, because he did his best not to remember his time downstairs, but eventually he realized that one of the reason his sneaking around was going so well was because the place was under attack. Hundreds of his brothers were attempting to storm inside, all sound and fury. As they died so great was their shock and fear it broadcast to every angel in the vicinity and even Dean who was normally cut off from angel radio could hear their cries.

They were coming for Righteous Man, and while Dean was glad they hadn’t just abandoned the poor sod, he was horrified that Generals could throw away the lives of his brothers so cheaply. They weren’t even in the right general location, and the Generals should know that

It was plain wrong and he wavered over what to do. In the end he decided to stick with his original plan. Remove the Righteous Man and his brothers’ reason for being there would be removed and everybody could retreat upstairs and be safe.

Win-win. Dean liked those sort of plans.

Except for the part where he had to creep into Alastair’s chamber of horrors. That part he really wasn’t fond of. He peeked cautiously into the room, hoping Alastair had gone for, dunno, a break or something. Surely the son of a bitch got bored of the endless torture at some point? 

Luck wasn’t with Dean. Alastair stood by the door, supervising two minions bringing in another soul for him to play with. The soul jerked and twisted but that wasn’t going to do any good. Dean looked away.

The Righteous Man stood in the center of the room. Chains hung from wrists and ankles, keeping him pinned down in the room but granting him enough freedom to reach Alastair’s rack. In his hands he held one of Alastair’s knives, wet with fresh blood.

And yet the Righteous Man’s soul was still so bright it was like looking into the sun. Dean stared, completely dazzled.

Eventually he dragged his eyes away and focused on the rest of the scene. It looked pretty much how Dean’s nightmares remembered it. Around the walls hung cages, each filled with a soul in the process of disintegration. In between the cages were racks of metal tools, barbed whips, and anything else Alastair’s demented imagination could conjure. The centerpiece of the room was the huge rack rusty with old blood.

No, Dean shook his head, that had been the centerpiece. Now it was just a prop. Alastair’s showpiece was the Righteous Man himself.

Dean felt sick at the thought of that brilliant soul slowly rotting away. As he watched Alastair dismissed the minions and dragged the soul over to his rack. She was female, still enough herself to appear as she had while alive, a slim red head that Dean believed men would call beautiful.

Her soul was corrupt, hard and sharply spiked in life, it had twisted downstairs into something still harder and sharper and yet soft with decay. Dean wanted to hold her close until she uncurled into the quick, supple, lovely thing Dad had intended.

Alastair grinned, “I have a present for you, my precious.” He strapped the soul to the rack as it whimpered in fear.

The Righteous Man tilted his head, “Anna?”

“Castiel?” the soul stiffened, spines spiking defensively. “Castiel, you’re not going to hurt me. You see, I really can read people. And you’re a hunter sure, but you’re not a torturer.”

“I am, like you, as the world made me.” The Righteous Man, Castiel, unhooked a cat o’nine tails at the crook of Alastair’s finger.

Dean decided he needed a distraction right then. He figured there was one person who might distract Alastair from his precious, and, handily, Dean was already there.

He siphoned off a little of his grace, rolling it carefully into a ball. Then he drew back his arm and cast it far into the depths. The explosion was even more spectacular than he had expected. The cages danced on their hooks, and Alastair’s head shot up. He sniffed the air.

“I know that stench. My favorite toy returns. Oh don’t be jealous,” he cooed suddenly at Castiel. “My angel will soon learn his place. He’ll be the perfect plaything for you, my precious.”

Dean watched Alastair scurry away. He had to take a moment to swallow back his reaction to Alastair’s plans. When he was steady on his feet, he hurried into the chamber.

The trapped souls around him gasped. Castiel turned to stare at him. He looked gob-smacked.

“You are the angel.”

“Yes I am, now we gotta move quick.”

“You should leave. I don’t want to see you on the rack.” Castiel’s soul curdled at that thought.

“Sure,” agreed Dean, “the Righteous Man, you’re bound to be self-sacrificing, but this is a rescue mission, so we need to get a move on.” He grabbed one wrist, disintegrating the chain around it with a burst of grace.

Castiel stabbed him with the knife.

“Ow shit, what the fuck was that for?” Dean yanked the knife out and disintegrated another chain.

“You should leave.”

“Oh great, apparently you’re as irrationally argumentative as Sammy. Sometimes Dad has a really sick sense of humor.” He zapped both ankle chains in one burst of irritation.

“Please, please,” begged Anna from the rack, “please let me go too.”

“See,” said Dean, “that’s a helpful attitude.” And really it wasn’t that much more effort, so he started to work her free too.

“You can get the others out?”

“Yes, yes, the more the merrier,” if it got the idiot moving he didn’t much care. A bundle of keys appeared in Castiel’s hand and he shot across the room to start unlocking cages.

“Really Castiel,” said Anna as she sat and rubbed her wrists, “pick-pocketing, how very unrighteous.”

“Oh shut up and help me get these cages undone before the angel changes his mind.”

“I am not that brother of yours. I don’t follow your orders.”

“What gave you the impression Balthazar followed my orders?”

“Less yapping, more running in terror.” Dean disintegrated a couple of cages. Clearly, if he wanted to get the Righteous Man out of here, it was a case of everyone else coming too. You try and do one good deed and look where it gets you. “And anybody who wants to get out of here is following my orders, capice?”

“Sure thing, angel-face,” said Anna. She shifted in a way Dean imagined was supposed to be seductive but merely revealed the weeping sores on her soul. It hurt to see.

Leaning forward he kissed he gently on the forehead, “Be at peace, my child.”

She jerked away from him like he’d done something disgusting and scrubbed at her forehead with both hands. “What the hell was that?” she jeered. “Guess angels really are junkless.”

But Dean could see the way the spines on her soul quivered, softening just for an instant.

The rumble rattled through downstairs like the endless beat of angel wings. The walls the shook, the remaining cages split open, and Alastair’s rack cracked clean in two.

“Oops,” said Dean

“What the hell?” yelled Anna. 

“Angel?” shouted Castiel over the thundering. Too shattered to react, the other souls just huddled in on themselves trembling.

The shaking settled slowly and for a moment there was pure silence before the clamor of hell restarted.

“Angel?” Castiel asked again.

Dean grimaced apologetically. “We should get out of here while they’re distracted.”

“Angel?”

“Sorry. Didn’t think it through properly. Blessing in hell, probably the first one ever, so the results were a bit unpredictable.” He glanced away and rubbed at the back of his neck.

“Are you _embarrassed?”_ The Righteous Man’s soul was sparking brightly, it was the most gorgeous thing Dean had ever seen and he’d watched the stars glow in the moment of their creation.

“Seriously, let’s just go.”

Between the angelic invasion, and the distraction of the blessing, they slipped easily out of hell. It took a little while to get all the souls out, the gate was more effective at keeping stuff downstairs. Castiel pulled back and made it clear he was going to be the last one out. Dean didn’t bother to protest, just patiently ferried them out one at time.

When he finally emerged, Righteous Man intact, the souls all huddled up around him.

“So what now?” demanded Anna stiffly, no give at all in her posture.

“Hang on tight.” He swept up Anna and the rest of the small broken souls under one wing, the Righteous Man under the other. Then he took flight.

After a while Castiel asked dryly, “Are you sure you can fly?”

“Shush you.” Sure Dean was wallowing through the sky like a leaky barge but it was plain rude to point it out. “I’m unbalanced and overloaded. And anybody who wants to get down and walk can do so.”

Dean totally didn’t smirk when Castiel hung on a little bit tighter.

Upstairs wasn’t precisely straight up, just like downstairs wasn’t quite straight down. Sliding sideways upstairs was trickier though, because Dean really, really didn’t want to get caught. He’d been doing this for a long time though, so, while he glided in ungracefully and juddered to a stop, nobody noticed.

“So I can’t get you into Heaven exactly,” he started.

“What? Don’t tell me? There are some rules even you can’t break,” sneered Anna.

Dean’s smile grew fixed, “Okay, let me rephrase that. I can get you into Heaven but since you aren’t authorized entrants they’ll spot you pretty much immediately and chuck you right back downstairs – if you’re lucky.”

Anna tossed her hair but didn’t say anything more. A couple of the other souls whimpered and Dean gently stroked his wings over them.

“As I was saying, I can’t get you into Heaven exactly but I can sort of sneak you in at the edge. Here,” he carefully peeled back a corner of Heaven.

The souls in his care purred like comfortable cats when they saw his field of lights.

“Now you won’t get the full upstairs experience, no surround sound tv,” he hunched his wings because he always felt a bit bad about that, “but you can sleep.”

“We’ll take it,” snapped Anna. She was projecting gruffness but her whole soul shivered with eagerness. The others trebled in agreement. One thing about being pulled out of downstairs, practically anything was a better option.

“Okay then.” He tucked them in safely and they snuggled down together becoming little glowing points of light. Finally it was just Anna and Castiel left.

Anna balked when he beckoned to her.

“Come on,” he said, “I promise I’ll keep you safe.”

“Truly?”

“Pinkie swear.”

She rolled her eyes, “For an angel I suppose you could be worse.” And she settled sweetly into sleep.

Then it was just Castiel, who sighed with his whole soul, so tired and worn it made Dean’s heart ache, “I think I could sleep forever,” he confessed softly, like it was a grievous sin.

Dean curled his wings miserably around himself.

“But I’m not going to get the chance, am I?”

“No, sorry.” Dean could feel all his feathers droop. “I would let you if I could, honest. But you’re, well, important. And if they can’t find you, they’ll start looking. And they’ll find you. Them too.” He nodded to his field of stolen souls.

“It’s fine.” He turned slightly and cut off the apologies Dean wanted to make by asking, “So what are all of those?” He pointed to the further points of light stretching out to the horizon.

“Other souls.”

“But, you said this wasn’t heaven.”

“It’s not. If you want an analogy, they’re being tucked under the carpet.”

“Where’d they all come from?”

“Previous trips downstairs.” Dean tilted his head. Surely, as the Righteous Man, Castiel should be smarter than this.

“So you’ve raised thousands of souls from hell.” Castiel’s soul glowed at him.

Dean shifted from foot to foot, “There’s no need to make it sound so altruistic.” 

It was win-win: the souls got out of hell, Dean got to enjoy their happy contended hum at the back of his head. It helped make up for the absence of his brothers. Remembering back before made Dean shiver with loneliness even now. He’d never been so relieved as the day he discovered the side-effect of tucking souls away.

“Absolutely,” said Castiel, smiling like he knew something Dean didn’t.

“I don’t know why I’m explaining any of this to you, it’s not like you’re going to remember it.”

“I’m not?”

“Humans just don’t. Once you’re back in your body you won’t be able to see souls or any of this, and you won’t remember either. I mean, something of downstairs will stick, you were down there too long for it not to, but other than that, nope.”

“But you will be there?”

“If you want me to be?”

“I do.”

“Okay then.” Staying close to the Righteous Man just made sense. Whatever went down, he’d be at the center of it. And Dean had never seen another soul glow so brightly, right now it was incandescent.

Scooping the precious soul up carefully, he took wing.

“You know,” Dean grinned, “we can do some acrobatics if you want?”

Judging by the glare, Castiel was a nervous flyer.


End file.
